by Anatoly Liberman
HOOSIER.
Almost exactly two years ago, on July 30, 2008, I posted an essay on the origin of the nickname Hoosier. In it I expressed my cautious support of R. Hooser, who derived the “moniker” for an inhabitant of Indiana from a family name. I was cautious not because I found fault with his reasoning but because it is dangerous for an outsider to express his opinion on a special subject; American onomastics (a branch of linguistics devoted to the study of names) is not my area. The bibliographers who had done outstanding work in listing the documents pertaining to Hoosier seem to have missed the article in Eurasian Studies Yearbook, 1999, 224-231. However, none of them reacted to my defense of the Hauser/Hoosier hypothesis either. Perhaps they missed that post: it is impossible to follow everything that appears in the Internet. Only Mr. J. Vanhoosier wrote a few words about the history of his family. His comment dates to February 2009. Mr. Randall Hooser (in Yearbook, his full name was not given) noticed my post in June 2010 and responded in some detail. Comments that are added so late have no chance of attracting my attention, because this weekly blog has existed for more than four years, but Mr. Hooser contacted me and sent me numerous supporting materials. His interpretation of historical evidence does not seem to be controversial, and I will deal only with the etymology of the nickname.
Mr. Hooser is not a linguist, and this is why he made too much of the fact that the High German au corresponds to long u (transliterated as Engl. oo) in Alsace, the homeland of the Hausers/Hoos(i)ers. But this correspondence needs no proof. In Middle High German, long i and u (transliterated by Engl. ee and oo) underwent diphthongization, which spread from Austrian Bavarian dialects in the 12th century and later became one of the most important features of the Standard. The “margins” of the German speaking world were unaffected by the change, so that the north (Low German) and the south (Alsace and Switzerland) still have monophthongs where they had them in the past. What has not been accounted for is the variant Hoosier as opposed to Hooser. In my 2008 post, I referred to such enigmatic American pronunciations as Frasier for Fraser and groshery for grocery, but analogs have no explanatory value. However, according to Mr. Hooser, linguists from Kentucky informed him that in the Appalachian area this type of phonetic change is regular, so that Moser becomes Mosier, and so forth. The cause of the change remains undiscovered. Although in this context the cause is irrelevant, I may note that in many areas of the Germanic speaking world one hears sh-like s, notably in Icelandic and Dutch, but not only there. Sh for s and zh (the latter as in Engl. pleasure, as you, and genre) for z characterized the earliest pronunciation of German. The Proto-Indo-European s was, in all likelihood, also a lisping sound. Perhaps the area from which the Hoosers migrated to America has just such a sibilant.
The original derogatory meaning of Hoosier is certain. Yet the word’s adoption by Indiana should cause no surprise; compare Suckers and Pukes for the inhabitants